I continue to read the great book English Garden Eccentrics. The main idea is that…
Sometimes Gardens Are too Big
Do you sometimes feel like your garden is too big? There just seems a lot to do.
This idea of too much hits me now in May when I am working in the garden to clean up from winter, weed, transplant, and fill pots for the summer.
I have built my garden over the past twenty-five years, a bit at a time.

Rochester seedsman James Vick (1818-1882) once raised the same question.
He wrote in his seed catalog of 1872: “The great difficulty with American gardens is that they are too large, and not sufficiently cared for. If we gave the same amount of labor on a quarter of an acre that we now expend on an acre, the result would be much more satisfactory.”
Vick recognized that a gardener needs a sense of satisfaction in the work of gardening. One way to achieve that is to have less to cultivate.
Somehow I feel Vick’s insight is just as appropriate for a gardener today as it was in the 1880s.
Share this:
Agreed!
I feel the same right now as I look at all the things I need to do out there. But we do want to have fun with it all, right? Happy gardening.